Hands On With The Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T

LAS VEGAS – What should we do about the phablet? As widely anticipated by everyone, the Samsung Galaxy Note, with its 5.3-inch screen, is coming to AT&T's LTE network. I spent some time with it, and it has its appeal, but I just don't see where a 'tweener' like this fits in the world of phones and tablets.

The Galaxy Note is slim and elegant, like a shrunken-down version of one of Samsung's tablets, or a blown-up version of one of Samsung's phones. It runs the Google Android Gingerbread phone OS with a 1280-by-800 tablet resolution, on the kind of 1.5Ghz dual-core processor that you see in both phones and tablets. (Yes, it's faster than the 1.4Ghz processor in the international Galaxy Note model.)

It also comes with a pressure-sensitive "S Pen" stylus you can use to do a lot of neat drawing tricks. You can pop up a quick notepad on the screen—you know, for notes. You can take insta-screenshots of webpages and annotate them as images. The built-in drawing program has various brushes, and the stylus will be supported by third-party drawing programs as well, Samsung said.

Other specs include 16GB of built-in memory plus an SD card slot, along with the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. There's an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video recording on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front, and a big 2500 mAh battery to power both that big screen and the power-hungry LTE radio.

The screen is Super Amoled HD, not Plus, which means it's PenTile, which means it will look a little bit grainier to people with super-sharp eyes than the Super Amoled Plus on Samsung's Galaxy S II phones. Most people won't be able to notice the difference, though; I can only notice it if I'm really looking for it.

Samsung said AT&T will be selling this thing as a smartphone, but I'm just not convinced that it qualifies as a primary phone, or as a primary tablet purchase. It just barely fits in one hand or a pocket, and holding it up to your head looks just short of comical. It's the right size for my five-year-old daughter to play with drawing apps on, but I think a seven-inch tablet would be even better for that. Samsung has sold a million Notes around the world, sure, but I just don't get it.

Samsung tried to pitch me a few target markets for the Note: for instance, older people who want big type, or artists who will love sketching with the stylus. (I'm sure our former editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff, an inveterate doodler, would get a real kick out of it.) But I'm cautious about outliers, and about anything that doesn't have an ecosystem. This feels a little bit like the dual-screen concept behind Kyocera's Echo phone—an experiment born of curiosity rather than any real demand for this screen size. Maybe I'll change my mind when I review it.

Samsung didn't give me a release date or price for the Galaxy Note.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

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